The future is here and we're splashing around in it

 Hi, and come on in to the Anthropocene.

It appears there's just the two of us, you and me.

"Welcome to the end of the natural world as a realm that is somehow meaningfully distinct from humanity," as Curt Stager puts it in his new book, "The Deep Future, the Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth" (Thomas Dunne Books, 2011).

Ever since Copernicus put the sun at the center of the solar system, we've been drifting away from our privileged place in time and space.

But now we're making a comeback.

Every little thing we do--every footstep, splash, motion, action and reaction--has a consequence. We lack the "capacity to destroy the planet" but also the ability to return it to "a state of nature, if such a state implies no human influence". Stager notes that a mature perspective on the global environment cannot find escape in the apocalypse, in the false hope of a return to a pre-human state, nor in the belief that short term benefits trump long-term costs.

Clearly, the earth is changing as is our place in it, dramatically enough that "The Economist" put the planet on the cover of its May 28, 2011 edition with the headline "Welcome to the Anthropocene", spotlighting "humans as a geological force to be reckoned with."

Might as well be happy, as a friend puts it, and have fun while we're here: thoughtful, however, that our time at the center of the universe was nice--an illusion as it turns out--and that our influence on the future is profound, much deeper than we once imagined.